ANALYSIS:The trial of Radovan Karadzic, starting today, will examine his role in some of the 1992-95 war's worst episodes, writes DANIEL McLAUGHLIN
A FLEET of buses left Sarajevo for The Hague this weekend, taking survivors of the Bosnian war to see the man who they believe sought to wipe them off the face of the Earth.
But those Bosnian Muslim men and women may be disappointed, if not entirely surprised, if Radovan Karadzic carries out a threat to skip his long-awaited appointment with justice today.
Karadzic has always been an elusive figure. From his days as a minor Sarajevan poet and psychiatrist, to his grim pomp leading Bosnia’s Serbs during the 1992-5 war, then as a hunted fugitive and now facing trial for genocide and war crimes at the UN tribunal, the personality of the man has been as hard to pin down as his whereabouts.
The self-proclaimed saviour of the Serb nation was not born in Serbia or Bosnia, where his infamy would be forged, but in the remote mountain village of Petnjica in Montenegro on June 19th, 1945.
Far from Montenegro’s limpid Adriatic coast, Petnjica clings to bleak Mount Durmitor high in the interior, where young Radovan was steeped in a poisonous brew of poverty, isolation and the bitter pride of a nation whose history runs red with heroic defeat. “His personality is the result of a weird Montenegrin context. You’d have snow for five, six months, and the only literature was folk music sung with a gusle – no TV, no radio,” said Montenegrin writer Jevrem Brkovic.
“Gusle music is a kind of melodramatic epic, myth-building, which destroys the modern human being. He is a typical guslar – yeti, a snowman from Durmitor Mountain, who lived on gusle and bread as a kid,” Brkovic said in a documentary about Karadzic, whom he knows well.
Radovan’s father Vuko was a “Chetnik” – a member of Serb royalist-nationalist forces that initially opposed Yugoslavia’s Nazi invaders but later collaborated with them against Tito’s communist partisans. When Tito took control of Yugoslavia after the war, the Chetniks were banned and many members jailed. As a result, Vuko Karadzic was in prison for much of Radovan’s childhood.
The bright boy was sent from the village when he was just 15 years old to continue his studies in Sarajevo. Those that remember his arrival and first years in that relatively cosmopolitan, multi-ethnic city recall a young man with the dress sense and bouffant hair of a provincial, but also his peculiar conviction that he was destined for prominence.
Neither psychiatry nor poetry brought Karadzic the recognition that he craved, however. And so he turned to politics.
After initially joining the Green party – when he said that “Bolshevism is bad, but nationalism is even worse” – Karadzic finally found and slipped into a quickening current that would sweep him to power. Ultimately, it would also carry him on to a trial at The Hague on 11 counts of war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity.
That current was the nationalism that Karadzic had once decried, and by the late 1980s it was surging through an increasingly fractious Yugoslavia, thanks largely to Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic.
“In poetry and in life, Karadzic was a person without personality. He was like clay, without personality, without character, who could be moulded,” said another long-time acquaintance of Karadzic, writer Marko Vesovic. “The man of clay was ideal student. He did what he was told.”
Supported by Milosevic, in 1989 Karadzic founded Bosnia’s Serbian Democratic Party which, like its equivalent in Croatia, intended to keep Bosnia’s Serbs inside Belgrade-dominated Yugoslavia in the event of secession by Sarajevo or Zagreb.
When Bosnia followed Slovenia, Macedonia and Croatia in declaring independence from Yugoslavia in 1992, Karadzic immediately announced the formation of a breakaway Serb republic, and Serb paramilitaries and Yugoslav army troops launched an onslaught on the rest of Bosnia. The war that ensued lasted until 1995, claimed some 100,000 lives and plunged a swathe of south-eastern Europe into a maelstrom of torture, murder and ethnic cleansing.
The trial that is due to start today – which Karadzic says he will boycott due to lack of time to prepare his defence – will examine his role in some of its most gruesome episodes.
Along with his military chief, Ratko Mladic, Karadzic is accused of responsibility for the 43-month Serb bombardment of Sarajevo, the longest siege of a capital city in modern history, which killed at least 10,000 civilians and injured 50,000 in a barrage of shelling and sniper fire.
The pair are also blamed for the July 1995 massacre at Srebrenica, the worst atrocity in Europe since 1945, which saw Mladic’s Serb forces allegedly murder about 8,000 Muslim men and boys.
Old acquaintances of Karadzic have struggled to reconcile the watchful country boy with the man who was indicted for war crimes in 1995, but several have recalled his obsession with bloody Balkan history and his apparent ability to believe even the most outlandish of his own lies.
He fuelled his people’s terror by depicting Bosnian Muslims as bloodthirsty “Turks” and Croats as Serb-hating “Ustashe”, evoking respectively the hated Ottoman occupiers of medieval Serbia and the vicious Nazi-allied Croatians who persecuted Serbs during the second World War.
During Bosnia’s war, he unwaveringly portrayed the rampaging Serbs as the peace-seeking victims of the fighting, and repeatedly accused Muslim leaders of committing atrocities against their own people to demonise the Serbs in international eyes. He proved to be a skilled and infuriating negotiator in talks with the West, delaying to the last before making the minimum of concessions.
As united Croat and Muslim forces pushed back Serb troops in the summer of 1995, and Nato aircraft attacked Serb units following Srebrenica and other massacres, infighting between Milosevic, Mladic and Karadzic left the latter increasingly isolated.
Facing a military rout and weary of international sanctions, Milosevic all but abandoned Karadzic and Mladic when he signed the Dayton Accords in November 1995 to end the war in Bosnia. He not only signed off on a new map of Bosnia that they opposed, but helped oust them from politics by agreeing that war crimes suspects should be banned from public office.
Karadzic stepped down as the first president of Bosnia’s Serb-run region, Republika Srpska, in July 1996, and soon went underground – in what he claims was his side of a secret deal with US officials that should now give him immunity from prosecution.
While reports suggested that Mladic for several years remained in Belgrade, ate at his favourite restaurants and went to football matches, Karadzic seemed to disappear without a trace. The few fanciful stories that did surface only deepened the mystery, placing him with secretive Serb Orthodox priests in the ancient monasteries that dot his native mountain fastness. But the reality was perhaps even stranger than the rumour.
When investigators caught Karadzic in July 2008, they said he had been living in a Belgrade suburb for several years under the guise of Dr Dragan Dabic, a bearded, pony-tailed new-age healer with his own website and magazine column. He spent his evenings in a local pub listening to gusle music between walls hung with photographs of himself and Mladic.
Other eyes will stare down at Karadzic today, or whenever he finally enters the dock: the Bosnians travelling to The Hague hope they will personally see justice in action.
The 69-page indictment against Karadzic includes these charges: “Radovan Karadzic participated in a joint criminal enterprise to permanently remove Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats from the territories of BiH (Bosnia-Hercegovina) . . . Radovan Karadzic and others formed the shared objective to eliminate the Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica by killing the men and boys and forcibly removing the women, young children and some elderly men.”
Karadzic’s visitors from Sarajevo, the city that took him in and which he tore apart, will confront him with living proof of his failure.
“We are going there to show to Europe and the world that we are still here,” said one, Munira Subasic – “still searching for the truth and still waiting for justice.”
Dan McLaughlin covers central and southeastern Europe for The Irish Times
IN THE DOCK: THE CHARGES AGAINST KARADZIC
THE OCTOBER 2009 indictment against Radovan Karadzic alleges crimes carried out by him and others in the Bosnian Serb political and military command – what is termed “a joint criminal enterprise” – during the Bosnian war in the 1990s.
Their criminal aims, according to the indictment, were: “(1) to spread terror among the civilian population of Sarajevo through a campaign of sniping and shelling; (2) to eliminate the Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica; and (3) to take United Nations personnel as hostages.
“The pursuit of each of these objectives was related to the objective of the overarching joint criminal enterprise to permanently remove Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats from Bosnian Serb-claimed territory in BiH [Bosnia and Herzegovina].”
The indictment continues: “Radovan Karadzic participated in an overarching joint criminal enterprise to permanently remove Bosnian Muslim and Bosnian Croat inhabitants from the territories of BiH claimed as Bosnian Serb territory by means which included the commission of the following crimes charged in this indictment: genocide (under count 1), persecution, extermination, murder, deportation and inhumane acts (forcible transfer).”
He is also accused of the “causing of serious bodily or mental harm to thousands of Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats, including leading members of these groups, during their confinement in detention facilities . . .
“At these locations, detainees were subjected to cruel or inhumane treatment, including torture, physical and psychological abuse, rape, other acts of sexual violence and beatings . . . under conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction, namely through cruel and inhumane treatment . . . and the failure to provide adequate accommodation, shelter, food, water, medical care or hygienic sanitation facilities”.
Karadzic is also charged over the siege of the Bosnian capital Sarajevo which was designed, says the indictment, to “spread terror among the civilian population . . . through a campaign of sniping and shelling”.
He is also charged with instigating the worst crime committed on European soil since the end of the second World War – the genocide of more than 7,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica in 1995.
The indictment asserts that Karadzic “knew or had reason to know that genocide was about to be or had been committed by his subordinates and he failed to take the necessary and reasonable measures to prevent such acts or punish the perpetrators thereof . . .
“[He] participated in a joint criminal enterprise to eliminate the Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica . . . Radovan Karadzic intended to destroy the Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica as part of the Bosnian Muslim national, ethnical and/or religious group.
“He shared this intent with other members of this joint criminal enterprise.”
The full indictment may be read on the website of the International Tribunal for the Prosecution of Persons Responsible for Serious Violations of International Humanitarian Law Committed in the Territory of former Yugoslavia since 1991 – www.icty.org